Photos

For its Black and White Quest, 500px asked for submissions that were stronger without colour. The winner is Michail Christodoulopoulos with this evocative Semana Santa image. Why did the judges pick it? “This is a perfect use of black and white — it emphasizes its mood and tone. The shallow depth of field and composition makes the viewer’s eye go back and forth through this line of men and their expressions.”

And the story behind the winning entry: “This photo was taken in Malaga last year during the Semana Santa / Holy Week,” says Christodoulopoulos. “I’ve been living in Spain for almost 14 years, but I never miss the processions from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, where the confraternities of Malaga carry their floats, representing the Passion of Christ from His entry into Jerusalem to His Resurrection.”

Writing for LensCulture about Richard Sandler’s book The Eyes of the City, Serge J-F. Levy says: “The images, made in New York City and Boston, are an emphatic reminder of the sharp edges of humanity lurking around every corner. Richard’s book is a journey that winds through 24 years of circumambulating airports, ferries, night clubs, up Fifth Avenue, down Madison Avenue, into the subways, inside and outside of political conventions and deep into the fraught core of civilization.”

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” — Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“The old house is still standing tho’ the paint is cracked and dry
And there’s that old oak tree that I used to play on
Down the lane I walk with my sweet Mary
Hair of gold and lips like cherries
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.”

The great British photographer Martin Parr is famed for intimate images that often take a sardonic look at life. His seaside images are particularly revealing in their depiction of the different social strata at play. This non-Parr photo is a tribute to the master.

When poets remember their mothers, they portray the complexities of a relationship in which the mother is both intimately known and yet oddly mysterious. In Seamus Heaney’s sequence Clearances, written in memory of his mother, he includes a sonnet about the beautiful ordinary moments that happened while he and his mother peeled potatoes in the kitchen. The silences are broken by “pleasant splashes” of water as the potatoes drop into a bucket.

But the next sounds we hear are of sobbing and of murmured prayers: “some were responding and some crying”. As his mother dies, Heaney recalls the peeling of those potatoes “when all the others were away at Mass” and “our fluent dipping knives — Never closer the whole rest of our lives.” The beauty of that moment is heartbreaking.

In memoriam M.K.H., 1911 – 1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives —
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

The great American photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, once said: “I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it’s got lots of accounting going on in it — stones and buildings and trees and air — but that’s not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.”

There’s plenty of room for us to get into to this typical Meyerowitz photo titled “Storm Over Corn Hill Beach”. By the way Corn Hill Beach is located in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Here, Joel Meyerowitz explains his photography philosophy. It’s about your camera and, especially, it’s about what you put in the frame, he says.

In Robert Goddard’s mathematical thriller, Out of the Sun, the hero, Harry Barnett, visits Kensal Green Cemetery and muses upon the erasure that death accomplishes: “The broken pillars still stood, the hollow helmets still echoed. But the thousands of names — and thousands of people they had once been — vanished sooner or later, beneath the lichen of utter forgetfulness. The memorials outlasted the memories. They alone remained, in this petrified forest of ceremonied mortality.”

“I am Ireland-based photographer with a background in arts, who came to Ireland 13 years back, had a crush on Irish landscapes and haven’t left ever since.” So say Max Malloy, who was born in Latvia and spent his childhood beside the Baltic. He moved to Ireland 13 years ago “to be closer to the ocean and to the never ending green fields.” A constant theme in his work is what is called the Wild Atlantic Way: “i enjoy every frame that highlights the beauty of the ocean, the grandness of the cliffs.”

“People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.” — Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter